Washington
Higher education will have to be more accountable for its performance and more open to consumers about the actual cost of attending a college, and help people make easier comparisons among institutions, in order to succeed as the nation's economic engine, says a new report from two nonprofit think tanks here.
Two major voluntary efforts under way to measure and report colleges' costs and academic effectiveness are inadequate, and provide parents and students with too little information to make informed choices about where they will get the most from their tuition dollars, say researchers at the two organizations, the libertarian-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Education Sector, which is a proponent of reforming higher education
And without a more thorough and open form of accountability, institutions will not have any incentive to make the changes that will improve students' success, concludes the report, "False Fronts? Behind Higher Education's Voluntary Accountability Systems."
"If existing flaws are not resolved, the nation runs the risk of ending up in the worst of all worlds: the appearance of higher education accountability without the reality," the authors say.
Shortcomings Described
The two voluntary systems criticized in the study are the University and College Accountability Network, begun in September 2007 by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities to provide information about private colleges, and the Voluntary System of Accountability, which gives information about public colleges and is maintained by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.
Both systems are online tools that provide profiles of institutions that choose to participate, sharing information on costs of attendance, enrollment, student engagement, and academic achievement.
But the report criticizes the private-college accountability network as "essentially a repackaging of data that are available elsewhere."
"While its search engine does accommodate institutional comparisons on the basis of student characteristics (e.g., SAT scores), graduation and retention rates, and college costs, it does not obligate institutions to gather or reveal any data that are not already available elsewhere," the report concluded about the network, which is called U-CAN.
David L. Warren, president of the independent-college association, said "the report largely misses the point of U-CAN."
"The study criticizes the U-CAN's repackaging of existing data, without acknowledging that consumers historically do not know where to find this information in a consumer-friendly format," he said. Mr. Warren added that the number of colleges participating has grown from 440 in 2007 to more than 700 today.
Limited Search Tools
By comparison, Tuesday's report said the accountability system for public colleges is "a legitimate effort to provide students with important information about how much college costs and the education students receive in return." But that system is also limited, the authors say, because it does not allow side-by-side comparisons, and users "cannot search for schools that share a set of characteristics—admissions selectivity, cost, average time to degree—nor can they easily rank schools on any of the criteria that they might want to."
In addition, many institutions perceived to be at the top or bottom of the quality scale do not participate in the accountability system and have no incentive to do so, the report says.
Christine M. Keller, executive director of the Voluntary System of Accountability, says the participation of two-thirds of the members of the sponsoring associations is one sign that the effort is succeeding.
But the system is still in its early stages, and some of the measures being used to measure institutions' performance are still evolving. For example, the information on tuition and fees will be changed in the next few months, to match new federal standards for the cost information that colleges will have to begin reporting on their Web sites within the next two years.
In addition, the associations are beginning to offer workshops and other opportunities for system participants to learn how to use the data they're collecting to improve the college experience for students, she said.
Both the public and private accountability systems were developed after a controversial report from a panel formed by then-Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who served under President George W. Bush. The report, released in 2006, criticized the "lack of clear, reliable information about the cost and quality of postsecondary institutions."
And the change in presidential administrations has not lessened the need for accountability, the report says, because President Obama, a Democrat, has set a goal of having the nation become a world leader in the rate of citizens who earn postsecondary degrees or certificates.
Comments
1. demery1 - March 02, 2010 at 10:32 am
I would be delighted to see the AEI examine for profit institutions to gain data on academic achievement, student engagement, graduation rates, and placement.
We might lead the world in postsecondary degrees, but quality assurance in the fastest growing sector of higher ed. should follow.
2. 11262324 - March 02, 2010 at 10:56 am
VSA has the testing lobby written all over it and is asking for what most of us are already doing. If transparency is so important why don't these two "think tanks" come up with some solid recommendations. We have no problem putting information out there for all to see, just get away from the garbage that came out of the Spellings reign.
3. intered - March 02, 2010 at 10:59 am
This is such a large topic. We may all appreciate the cultural context inhibiting public accountability but it is also important to understand that this same accountability is lacking internally where it effectively thwarts attempts to manage the institution rationally; i.e., informed with a continuous flow of mission-critical performance information. With the scant objective information at their command, college presidents and their associates must perform as shamans, reading the tea leaves of opinion and passion among stakeholders.
Here are a few public metrics I would suggest in addition to graduation rates and basic costs. To be truly meaningful to the consumer, all of the applicable statistics must be presented for each specific degree. At present, schools are hiding seven year degrees inside the statistics of well-attended lockstep degrees with relatively shorter elapsed time to graduation.
1. Cohort elapsed time to graduation with 25th, 50th, 75th, & 99th percentile marks for annual cohorts for each degree, looking back as far as possible.
2. Plot #1 against "catalog" time to graduation based on full and partial load scenarios.
3. All in costs, for #1 and #2.
4. Number of students enrolled in each degree, year-on-year, looking back at least five years.
5. Drops and adds for #4.
6. Relevant job placements for each degree. An impartial panel consisting of academics and professionals in the discipline can come up with working criteria for relevance. I suggest a three-point rating system distinguishing high, moderate, and low relevance.
7. First year salaries for #6, nationally and locally.
8. The number/percent of practitioner-experienced instructors (either practitioner-adjuncts or full time instructors who have recent relevant professional experience teaching in each degree (e.g., an engineer who worked at Micron, a project management specialist who worked at Motorola). In most disciplines, this ratio correlates positively with learner satisfaction, graduation, and career success for students who are working or intend to work outside the university.
9. The percent of instructors in each degree holding various levels of degrees.
10. The extent to which the institution depends on taxpayer support. his is a relevant quality decision for the responsible working adults that make up 40% of today's college market.
As we contemplate these requirements, we must remember that the typical university has perhaps a half-dozen databases inadequately tracking portions of important information, and that these systems do not "talk" to each other.
On balance, America's institutions of higher education function in a managerial vacuum.
-- The precision management of resources, supply, and service quality taught in their classrooms is nowhere to be found in their institutional structure or function.
-- The modern learning and measurement sciences taught in their psychology, neurology, and education departments is nowhere to be found in their teaching practices.
We have a long way to go.
-----------------------------
Robert W Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.
www.InterEd.com
4. carolinewest - March 02, 2010 at 11:55 am
An undergraduate education is not vocational training. It is supposed to provide education in critical thinking, general knowledge, and communication and quantitative skills to be applied to what one encounters in life.
Tracking students by major makes no sense. Our institution has over a hundred majors, many closely related. A student may enter in biochemistry and find out after a few terms that the curriculum in molecular and cell biology better matches his or her interests. Should a transfer to that major be counted against biochemistry?
You can learn job-specific skills on the job--you use college to give you a foundation for thinking. I started college as a sociology major, passed through architecture and graduated in business (a mistake), auditing from every other department along the way. I went to graduate school in economics and have worked for a big 8 accounting firm, a state legislature, and a major research university since then. Of three recent graduates of my acquaintance, the linguistics major (from a UC) is forging a successful international career with an internet marketing company. There were no practitioners in the Linguistics department--she is learning on the job. They hired her for her theoretical training in linguistics. The two recent business major graduates (I'm sure they saw lots of practitioner/adjuncts at their institutions) are cobbling together the rent by selling gym memberships, waiting tables and scrambling for commissions in a sweatship, repackaging bad loans.
Public graduation rates, practitioner rates, and placement rates at the program level don't make sense. What the public needs to know is that there is a strong program review process in place, with teeth, so that retention, curriculum, and outcomes information for each program are studied in context by experts, and the administration makes sure needed corrections take place. The accreditation process is supposed to assure that those steps work. I understand that this is somewhat opaque to parents and prospective students, but you get what you measure. If you want barriers to valid major changing and vocational school thinking, just insist on publising outcomes by major.
5. intered - March 02, 2010 at 01:52 pm
US Higher education suffers, and in the 21st century fatally so, from the parochial notion that what it does is somehow so special as to be distinct from other human endeavors.
Contemplate a special surgery and you will want to know the practitioner's skills as defined by number of operations performed of this kind and success rates, the hospital infection rate, etc. Contemplate an automobile purchase and you will want to know MPG, crash test ratings, repair statistics, etc. Contemplate the services of an accountant and you will want to know how many clients of your type he serves, and the audit rate for clients of your type. In each of these cases, aggregate statistics are of less value because extremes, perhaps one occupied by your situation, may be obscured.
On the other hand, contemplate choosing a university and you will be asked to accept as sufficient evidence the institution's self-serving and often erroneous if not intentionally deceptive assertions with respect to its performance. You will be told not inquire as to the workplace skills of those who would teach us. You will not receive answers to simple questions such as all-in cost to degree based on average time-to-degree. You will be politely informed of the irrelevance of statistics such as actual graduation rates in the major of interest. It will be implied that asking such questions is inappropriate. University declarations, not unlike religious dogma, should be accepted as articles of faith.
As a public, should we ignore the fact that 40% of the nation's students are working adults who attend college to achieve very specific outcomes and tell us loudly and repeatedly that they prefer to be taught by instructors who have significant work experience in the discipline in which they are instructing?
As a public, should we take action upon the fact that the vast majority of college students, of any age, want to secure knowledge, understanding, and skills that will enable them to succeed in a career of some kind? Should we, instead, permit the universities' Mandarins to define a foundational (general, liberal, etc.) education based on how well it prepared individuals to function as informed citizens in the 19th century?
As a public, should we accept the assertions of the institution's Mandarins that we are there to learn critical thinking (CT)? Should we ignore the fact that few of these individuals understand the philosophical, methodological, and measurement scientific challenges associated with this construct? Should the fact that these Mandarins are (apparently) blissfully unaware of the decades of failed attempts to measure a robust construct of CT be of concern to us? Should we bother ourselves with the trivial fact that the best scientific evidence shows that CT does not develop as a dependent variable to classroom instruction? The Mandarins tell us to forget all that. They have decided what we are there to learn. Our goals are inconsequential. We must accept the guidance of the Mandarins because it would be churlish to ask for evidence.
If I tried, I could not make a better case for rushing, full speed, to develop a more scrutable model for higher education than is so articulately made in support of the status quo by members of the professoriate.
-----------------------------
Robert W Tucker
President
InterEd, Inc.
www.InterEd.com
6. wilkenslibrary - March 02, 2010 at 01:54 pm
Where is the evaluation of the students' component in success? Whatever the institution offers, and however it evaluates itself, if students do not bring a commitment of time and energy to their education, is that the institution's fault? In my classes, students run the gamut, from highly motivated to barely motivated. Some of them work sixty hours/week and have family commitments that outweigh their commitments to their studies. I offer the same opportunities for success to all, but my students don't all come in equally equipped to take advantage of them.
7. myedu - March 03, 2010 at 03:54 pm
Not to be self-serving, but there are alternatives to the self-disclosure of data provided by these private and public university consortiums, including some of the search functionality at the College Board website and that of my own firm, MyEdu. Undoubtedly, there is a financial benefit for institutions of higher education to obscure their similarities and prevent competitive analysis in a free and open marketplace - as evidenced by tuition trends and diligently tracked by the Chronicle.
The biggest barrier to apples-to-apples comparisons is the educational product itself: the degree. With different categories of requirements, department abbreviations, credit values, prerequisites, and innumerable other subrequirements, courses and degrees cannot be compared against each other or easily transferred. That is, consequently, our greatest data asset -- the deciphered degree requirements at over 1200 instutitions (mostly public, of course).
Another limitation, stated in the article, is that students and families simply need more data and innovative ways of correlating that data. MyEdu's fundamental innovation is to correlate schools, degrees, and careers. So if, for example, you start searching with a career in mind, our Explorer will suggest degrees that lead to that career, and finally schools offering those degrees. Regardless of where you start, we'll fill in the rest of the picture, so your academic choices are always relevant, without subordinating your higher education to purely vocational interests.
And we offer some nice granularity, like:
1. SAT and GPA averages within the admissions profiles
2. Cost calculator within the cost profile
3. Breakdown of 4-, 5-, and 6-year graduation rates
4. Workload estimator for each degree
5. Distribution map of present job placements per career, and more...
My point is not self-promotion but to say that this data is there; however, it requires great effort to make sense of it and the desire to present it in relevant ways -- 2 requirements that I would not hold my breath waiting for these consortiums to deliver, despite the negative publicity of this report. In fact, except for some data on professors and courses fielded from our users, all of this data is aggregated from the universities themselves, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCES, or other public sources. It's the fact that MyEdu aggregates it, correlates it, and publishes it for free that makes it so valuable.
My recommendation: create a movement to standardize degree requirements, so students can easily quantify and compare what they are purchasing from their institution and selectively substitute courses fulfilled at other physical and online universities.
Omri Goldshtrom
Program Director
www.MyEdu.com
8. radioflyer - March 04, 2010 at 05:42 pm
I have an undergrad in General Studies from American Public University and my experience with the university was mixed. Some of the classes were good but not the case for many of them. Most of the professors gave little or no feedback in our classroom discussions and the interaction was pretty shabby. Sometimes I would get comments on a writing assignment usually, just a grade. I complained a few times about it to my instructors but nothing happened.
One of my professors was really good and we became friends after I graduated. It was explained to me that faculty are way over worked and that full time people are required to teach something like 400 to 600 students a year. That's slave labor!. The pay I was told was bad and that most faculty struggle to make ends meet so they are not very motivated to teach. They do not consider tenure like most colleges for pay purposes. Part time faculty are paid on a per student basis at low wages. The last time I talked to my old professor, I was told that there were a group of faculty that were going to start pushing back on the university with something called a chaos initiative because they are fed up with being overworked and underpaid. Chaos stands for Cause Havoc Around Our School. Not sure what that is though but I think they are trying to organize something.
I am glad I graduated from APU but the quality of education in most of the classes was pretty bad.